Yuan Longping High-tech Agriculture began as a spin-off from the plant breeding programme of the Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Under a deal giving China's famous hybrid rice breeder Yuan Longping 5% of the shares in the company, it acquired the rights to use his name. Investment quickly poured in, but sales failed to keep pace, and the company soon became a target for a take-over. At the end of 2005, Xindaxin, a large real estate and agribusiness conglomerate based in Changsha, took over Hunan Academy of Agricultural Sciences' shares in the company, giving it a controlling interest. It immediately imposed a tough corporate culture and opened the door to foreign investors. (It's not clear whether Yuan Longping retained his shares in the company at this point.)
Yuan Longping High-tech Agriculture was thus ripe for Vilmorin The French seed corporation, now the world's fourth largest seed company, has been in major expansion mode as of late, especially in Asia. Together with French food corporation Danone, it signed a deal in 2006 with Indian biotech firm Avesthagen giving Vilmorin 4.3% of the shares in the company and setting up two holding companies in India to make acquisitions. Shortly after, Vilmorin and Avesthagen, which is partly owned by the powerful Tata Group, purchased two Indian seed companies, Swagasth, which focuses on cereals, and Ceekay, a vegetable seed company.
Vilmorin representative Daniel Chéron says that the company wants to make India a base for its operations because of the potential size of the seed market and the open regulatory environment for GMOs. The same goes for China. Along these lines, shortly after buying-up shares in Longping High-tech, Vilmorin's Dutch subsidiairy KeyGene (which it jointly owns with four other seed companies) struck a deal with the Institute for Plant Physiology and Ecology of the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to set up a Joint Lab for Plant Molecular Breeding within the Shanghai campus.
Vilmorin's not the only multinational moving aggressively into the Chinese rice seed market. This past April we reported on Bayer's two hybrid rice seed joint ventures in China. Syngenta has also made some recent moves. In May, it bought a 49% stake in Sanbei, reportedly the 12th largest seed company in China (according to 2003 figures). The Beijing-based company focuses on maize, controlling approximately 5% of the national hybrid maize seed market, but it also produces hybrid rice seed. And, like Vilmorin, Syngenta's seeking tie-ups with public biotech research bodies as well. On June 25, 2007, it announced a five-year research collaboration with the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology in Beijing, also part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.